Google News for Android gets redesign scrapping top five stories

It appears that Google has started pushing out a redesign for Google News on Android. The new app design features a larger ‘Your briefing’ title and weather widget but doesn’t appear to stick to the rigid top five stories as the old design had used to. Also, with the COVID-19 pandemic seemingly coming to an end, you might have been wondering when the COVID-19 news banner at the top of the app was going to go away; it has gone with this refresh.

The new Google News home screen, which looks reminiscent of Apple News, starts off with larger content before returning to a normal size as you scroll down, this is great if you’ve just gotten up and need a bit of time for your eyes to focus properly. Having checked the Google News widget, it appears that it still shows the top five stories from the old design that users can click through, hopefully, Google will get around to updating the widget to reflect better the way the app works now.

While the 'For you' page does kind of look how it used to, new coloured titles for ‘Local news’ and ‘Picks for you’ are more prominent. If you look through the rest of the app you won’t find much else that’s different.

Overall, the large headers at the top of the app are a nice change but people who have come to enjoy the top five stories will be a bit disappointed by the update. Hopefully, the Google News widget will also get a bit of attention so that the content better matches the refreshed design.

Google News for Android gets redesign scrapping top five stories